Considering how much bugs bug me, I picked the wrong state to live in. I remember soon after coming to Florida I watched what appeared to be a ten-inch long shiny bright blue armored caterpillar-thing burrow into the ground right in front of me. I mean it was surreal, the kind of event that makes me want out with a capital “O.”
Another time, my wife had created some fabulous munchies which I didn’t ABSOLUTELY clean up after. I returned to the kitchen after a neglectful pause to find a seven-inch, black, slithery, multi-long-legged spawn of the devil slurping on the remains of a jar of tamarind sauce. As soon as he saw me, I let out a Moe Stooge-style yowl of horror and wished I’d had a shotgun. In the seven nanoseconds it took for the sauce-sucking demon spawn to disappear through a crack in the pantry floor, I’d developed a case of the shivers that still clings to me.
The latest thing (though this is not quite as cinematic) is ants. They started coming in through, over, around, and under our kitchen window and onto the counter and swarming around the sink. The first day they visited, I could easily see the error of my ways: a not-completely-scrubbed-out jam jar. They were partying hearty in force in there and passing back snackage sufficient to satisfy the whole colony.
I cleaned the sink, dried and put away all the dishes, polished every visible surface, and finished with a light application of peppermint oil (the reputed anathema to ant sense gratification) all around. The ants kept coming, however, so I realized I would have to clean even more. I removed the mesh drain traps and scrubbed them thoroughly. I reached down with a soapy green pad into the bottoms of the bottoms of the sink drains, as far as my hand could go without getting my elbows caught in the grease trap. I left not even an atomic morsel of solid matter carry-able in the eager mandibles of even the most puny ant.
But the ants continued to keep coming. I reason that because the first crowd got such a scrump-diddly-icious strawberry jam buzz they reported their findings to every ant citizen in the ‘hood, who keep visiting on word of mandible alone.
At one point in the Great Ant Influx, I saw one carrying what looked like a potato flake (heaven knows where he got it from) about eleven times his size. But then, oh no! It got caught on top of a drop of water and remained there. My wife and I watched as the once lucky critter stood motionless, disappointed and defeated next to the drop of water that he couldn’t even see, which had robbed him of his good fortune. He looked like how I feel a lot of the time. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” my kindhearted wife said.
But anyway, the ants keep coming. They seem to keep finding things too small for me to clean and filling their little ant pockets with them. If one of us so much as lightly touches any surface near the sink with a fingertip that’s anything less than industrially degreased, sanitized, and aridly dry, a new gang shows up and parks themselves around the newly established Greasy Fingerprint Bar and Grill for a hog heavenly slurp fest.
I suppose it’s meant to make me a cleaner guy. At some point, they will stop coming, won’t they? I may be on my way to Godliness, but at this point I feel closer to Obsessiveness. I’m morbidly fascinated by the relentless march of ants into what has become Florida’s most antiseptic counter top. I’m trying to psych myself into Blessing-counting Mode, and thank God I haven’t yet had to endure a plague of larger, more destructive critters.
I had a real supersoul moment during my first and only visit to Alachua in 2001. We parked our 40 ft MCI sankirtan bus on the lawn and within minutes the ants started coming on to the bus. From the wheel to stairwell to the first two rows of seats. Then a b line to the left.
Someone must have informed these ants that we had recently installed laminate wood floors and that if they followed the crevasse where the seats were bolted in they would have a perfectly safe tunnel the back of the bus, underneath the flooring. That tunnel, they must have been informed leads to the trash can in the kitchen which has an apple core just waiting for them. It took them just moments to find the safest route. We didn’t even have to line the crevasse with apple juice for them to find it. I do not see any sensual input that would have led them to take that most perfect route.